TNPSC Current Affairs August 19, 2017

Topic : Latest Diary of Events

World Honey Bee Day

To create awareness about Beekeeping and uses of its products including Honey, Tribal Cooperative Marketing Development Federation of India Limited (TRIFED) is celebrating World Honey Bee Day (WHBD) on August 19 across the Country.

The main theme of celebrating WHBD is to save Indian honey bee.

Benefits of beekeeping:

Beekeeping has been useful in pollination of crops, thereby, increasing income of the farmers/beekeepers by way of increasing crop yield and providing honey and other beehive products, viz. royal jelly, bee pollen, propolis, bees wax, etc. that serves a source of livelihood for rural poor.

Therefore, honeybees/ beekeeping has been recognised as one of the important inputs for sustainable development of agriculture/ horticulture.

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Topic : New inventions on Science and Health, Latest Diary of Events

Artificial womb raises hope for premature babies

An artificial womb has been successfully used to incubate healthy baby lambs for a period of one week.

This leads to raises hope to this technology will one day be able to do the same for extremely premature babies.

Key facts:

Researchers have shown that preterm lambs were successfully maintained in a healthy, infection-free condition with significant growth, for a period of one week using ex-vivo uterine environment (EVE) therapy.

What is the artificial womb made up of?

The artificial womb is a high-tech amniotic fluid bath combined with an artificial placenta.

How it works?

EVE (Ex-vivo uterine environment) therapy allows for oxygenation of the extremely preterm infant using the umbilical vasculature, and is not dependent on the highly immature fetal lung.

Briefly, the infant is connected to a parallelised circuit comprised of artificial veins and arteries that supply blood to two membranous oxygenation devices, and submerged in a carefully controlled bath of artificial amniotic fluid.

The membranous oxygenators allow gas exchange (removal of CO2 and addition of oxygen) before the blood returns via the circuit to the fetus.

Nutrients and other medications are delivered directly to the fetus, which is under round-the-clock monitoring.

Therefore, EVF therapy can be an effective treatment strategy for extremely preterm infants born at the border of viability (22-23 weeks).